The Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM) on Telecom in its meeting today failed to take a decision on how many blocks an operator should be allowed to bid for in the auction that starts on March 11.
“EGoM today discussed the number of slots that CDMA and GSM players should be allowed to bid for. But, nothing has been finalised,” according to a source.
The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has already decided to auction 40 blocks of 1.25 MHz each in the 1,800 MHz band, 34 blocks of 1.25 MHz each in the 900 MHz band and 64 blocks of 1.25 MHz each in the 800 MHz CDMA band.
To ensure aggressive bidding, the DoT has also proposed that there should not be any restriction on the number of slots that a company should be allowed to bid in the upcoming auction for both CDMA and GSM spectrum.
The DoT’s proposal following the lukewarm response in the previous auction of 1800 MHz, while there was no bidder for the 800 MHz band of CDMA spectrum in the November auction.
In the previous auction, operators had to bid for minimum 4 blocks of 1.25 MHz each for the 1800 MHz band. For CDMA band, operators had to bid for atleast two blocks.
